Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

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Indie Game: The Movie and Work, Audience, & Motivation

Last week, I watched Indie Game: The Movie (it’s available on Netflix, so check it out if you subscribe). Overall, it was an extremely well-done documentary – very well-polished, very well-produced, and told the story of several developers in such a way that you genuinely care about what happens to them and their games.

But aside from all of that, I loved seeing the similarities between the game developers and the passion that they demonstrated for their games, their fears in building a product and how it would be received, and the battles they fought with people who would simultaneously use their product all the while insulting them publicly via the Internet.

Though these aren’t necessarily take aways, they’re interesting parallels nonetheless. Some I’ve seen in my own life, some I’ve wanted to avoid in my own life.

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Why I Terminate Blocks with Code Comments

Thanks to a number of open source contributors, I released WP Audio Player 1.3 to the WordPress plugin repository. For one of the pull requests, I mentioned the following:

I always terminate my blocks with a closing comment. Please keep this in the file.

Travis Northcutt also asked me about it via Twitter:

When it comes to writing code, I try hard to make sure that anything I do that’s outside of the normal coding conventions for a given platform has a rationale behind it.

Case in point: Ending my terminating braces with code comments.

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Yet Another Blogging Podcast – Episode 3: Scheduling Your Time

In the last episode of Yet Another Blogging Podcast, I shared several tips for generating and collecting ideas. Specifically, I discussed using your opinions, learning from existing projects, various material that you read, watch, or hear, and/or inspiration that you garner from other sites.

As I’ve said in the previous episodes, this isn’t meant to be the definitive guide to blogging. It’s nothing more than practical advice that I’ve found that has worked for me, and that answers a number of questions that I’ve received in previous posts and/or emails.

So, with that said, hopefully there will be something useful in this episode.

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WordPress Source Control: Commit Messages

Although Automattic uses Subversion for source control both for its themes and plugins, I keep a number of my plugins in Git repositories during development.

Additionally, 8BIT uses GitHub to keep track of all of our source code, issues, milestones, and so on. When it’s time to make a commit, we usually sync the Git repository with its Subversion equivalent.

I’ve used a number of different source control systems during my career – some distributed, some not – and I’ve never been someone who fights a so-called religious war over which is better. Each source control system has its advantages, disadvantages, and each one fits differently within the context of how a person or a team operates.

Currently, I really like Git but a lot of that has to do with how GitHub, the site, fits into my workflow. Sure, there are things about Git that I like, but it’s GitHub’s organization that fits how I do work.

Anyway, overtime I figured I’d discuss my thoughts on WordPress source control. In this post: commit messages.

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Streamlining My Application Workflows

One of the things that I’ve found myself doing more and more is experimenting with various tools, workflows, and actually not using certain applications just to see how it impacts my day-to-day.

Generally speaking, I’m the kind of developer who takes his time picking out his tools, creating his workflow, and then sticking with them – it takes a lot for me to change the way that I get my stuff done.

Case in point: I’ve written an entire post about the applications and tools that I use and I’ve rarely deviate from this.

But for the last two months or so, I’ve found myself beginning to experiment more and more with trying out certain tools, removing certain tools, or changing up my workflow to see how it impacts things (for better or worse).

Obviously, this is a bit of a less technical or a less WordPress-centric post, but I figure that I’m not the only one that does this. As such, I thought I’d share my application workflows, some of the things I’ve been experimenting with, the results, and even see what you guys are doing that’s similar.

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